Less wickedly subverting tropes and more inanely revelling in them like a naked jelly bath, God Hates Astronauts follows cosmic-powered super-dick Star Fighter, who gets his head beaten to a gristly swollen Toby Jug by a mustachioed Victorian boxer and his army of battling bears. As his relationship with his vacuous super-groupie wife Starrior degenerates, she hooks up with a ugly, but not as ugly as Giant Bulbous Head Man, cowboy haunted by the ghostly, floating head of a cow he failed to protect.

Star Fighter catches them in the act and lashes out, transposing the spectral cow head onto his own bloody stump (it explodes like a balloon full of yuk, like swollen heads do when they get shot), he goes increasingly nuts – unleashes an atomic punch that gives his hirsuit Batman analogue the Anti-Mugger a green third arm, sees his job threatened by the pompous rhino-man Dr Professor and has a frustrated cat with a rocket-pack called Simon represent him in court.

Meanwhile, a bunch of crab-headed aliens ruled by King Tiger Eating A Cheeseburger, who is a tiger eating a cheeseburger, are doing… something, not quite sure what, but it’s got a sort-of fast-food mascot Bucky O’Hare vibe to it, so it’s bound to be a good thing.

Deliriously odd, the real surprise about Browne’s folly is just how coherent it all is in narrative terms – the subject matter may be eyebrow-raisingly ludicrous and surreal, but there’s a real cause and effect and genuine sense of drama underpinning the whole thing. The art, too, is just as brash and bold as the concept, and produced over a period of years there’s a real, visible progression in skill and style that makes the later, cameo-laden spreads all the more impressive and energetic.

God Hates Astronauts began life as a 24-hour comic-creating challenge, and while the original black-and-white strip (included on this volume, along with origin stories drawn by the likes of Hack/Slash‘s Tim Seeley, Angel‘s Jenny Frison and frequent Jonathan Hickman collaborator Nick Pitarra) has that increasingly tiresome stream-of-consciousness narrative that’s never as funny as you think it is when writing it sloshed on Skittles at 3am, it underlines just how cohesive and complete the finished product is.